Burke got to his feet. “I’m Scottie’s father.”
“Scottie said his dad was a cop. I figured he meant some old flatfoot, but after he got picked up, I heard it was you.” The smile looked painted on the man’s face, part of a crudely drawn mask. “Nice to meet you, Chief Burke.”
Burke did not return the smile. “My son really isn’t able to have visitors,” he said.
“Oh, I know that. My name’s Dunlap. Harry Dunlap. I have a store over on Cordelia. Collectibles, that sort of stuff.” He looked down at Scottie. “Poor kid.”
“How do you know my son?”
“We did some business.”
“What kind of business?”
“He rented from me. Little room in the back of my store. Nothing much, but Scottie used to come there to sleep it off, you know? Four bucks a week, that’s all I charged him. Same as some flophouse. But a better place. Warm. Dry. Nobody bothering him. I could have got ten for a place like that. Nice, like I say, clean.” Dunlap toyed with the zipper of his parka with two
stubby fingers. “Anyway, when a couple days went by and I didn’t see him, I asked around, and that’s when I found out they’d picked him up and brought him here.” He shifted awkwardly. “So, how’s he doing, Scottie?”
“He’s dying.” Burke said it flatly.
Dunlap blinked, as if against a flash of light. “Well, I just, you know, wanted to drop by, us being friends and all, me and Scottie, that is.”
“How long have you known my son?”
“Like I said, a few weeks. I’d see him in that back room, you know, and we’d have a cup of coffee now and again. He was a good kid, like I said, a good—”
“I know what he was,” Burke cut in.
Dunlap flinched at the coldness in Burke’s voice. “Yeah. I mean, I guess it was tough. A man in your position. Big shot on the force, and all. And Scottie the way he was, a … well, a …”
Burke eyed Dunlap warily. “Is there something you want?”
“Me?” Dunlap looked as if he’d been caught red-handed.
“You didn’t come here to see Scottie.”
Dunlap plunged his hands into the pockets of the parka. “Well, like I said, Scottie was, you know, we was … well, to tell you the truth, he hadn’t paid me in a couple of weeks, and I figured maybe you might … I mean, being a man in your position, you might want to—”
“How much does he owe you?”
Dunlap attempted a joke. “Jeez, you’re just like Joe Friday.”
Burke stared at him without comprehension.
“Joe Friday,” Dunlap explained. “That cop on TV.
Dragnet.”
“How much did my son owe you?” Burke repeated.
“Couple weeks, like I said, so that would be … eight bucks, that’s all.”
Burke took out the money and handed it to Dunlap.
“Thanks,” Dunlap said. He sank the bills into his pocket but made no move toward the door.
“Is there something else?”
Dunlap released a short laugh, dry as a gunshot. “Me? No. I was just figuring you must be pretty busy. I mean, what with that murder. The kid they found in the park.”
Burke stepped back toward the bed. “I’d like to be with my son now.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, Chief,” Dunlap said. He dipped one shoulder, then the other, chuckled nervously. “I can call you Chief, right?”
Burke stared at him stonily. “You got what you came for,” he said evenly.
“Yeah, sure,” Dunlap squeaked. “Good night, Chief. I mean, good night … sir.” He turned and scurried out of the room, leaving nothing behind but the smell of cheap aftershave.
Burke sat in the chair beside Scottie’s bed, then grew restless and stood by the window instead, watching the street below, where, like a small black insect, he could see Dunlap scuttling down the avenue, heading north toward Cordelia, with its seedy bars and pawnshops and flophouses, the dreadful world his son had inhabited for years. He looked at Scottie’s hands. They were callused, the skin repeatedly scraped and scarred. He imagined his son dragging himself out of the gutter, clawing at the cement rim, already hungry for his next fix, eyeing an old woman with a purse. How far he had sunk, this boy. The depths he’d touched. A thief, a predator … the evil Evil made.
Dunlap’s words struck him like a slap on his face.
A man in your position. Scottie the way he was.
He felt rage against Scottie, at the waste of his life, of his own humiliation at the petty criminal Scottie became, but much earlier, too, embarrassed by Scottie’s boyhood failures, that he did poorly in school, never had a girlfriend, avoided all physical and mental competition, showed no interest in being a cop. Was it from the long ordeal of his father’s scorn that Scottie now wanted to be released?
Released.
Burke let the word direct his mind away from Scottie and back to the comforting security of his work, back to Albert Smalls, the clear purpose at hand. He considered the transcripts of Smalls’ many interrogations. Could he have failed to notice something in them? he wondered now. A crumb in the forest. In his mind he saw a little girl stroll through the park unharmed, saw his hand upon her shoulder. If he could find something in the transcripts, then Smalls would never lie in wait for this child. She would make it safely home, grow up, have children of her own. If he did not, she would die. His eyes swept over to Scottie. Too late, he thought, too late. But for some child not yet destroyed, there was still a chance.
Midnight, Ragtag Bar, 374 Trevor Avenue
Eddie Lambrusco glanced at the Schlitz beer clock. Midnight. Half the shift behind him. Halfway home to his daughter. He knew Mrs. Wilson would be looking in on her now, making sure she was all right, but the vision of her doing that gave him no comfort. It wasn’t Mrs. Wilson his daughter should see when she opened her
eyes in the darkness, not Mrs. Wilson’s hands that should tuck her in. It should be his hands. That’s what had been stolen from him, he thought. The deep satisfaction of fatherhood. Being a father. That was the one thing he was truly good at. But day by day, hour by hour, it had been ripped from him, this precious, precious thing. His anger spiked, but he choked it down. Stay calm, he told himself, remember what happens when you don’t. His fingers tightened into a lethal fist, but he forced them open. He couldn’t do what he wanted to do, what his rage urged him to do.
He glanced back to where Terry Siddell sat opposite him in the booth. The jukebox was playing at the back of the bar but Siddell had brought one of those small new-fangled radios. He turned it on and brought it close to his ear.
“What do you call that anyway?” Eddie asked.
“Transistor,” Siddell said. He toyed with one of the radio’s chrome knobs and the scratchy music increased in volume. “Transitor radio.”
“Small,” Eddie said.
“That’s the idea,” Siddell said in that superior way of his, looking peevish and resentful.
“So, what are you listening to?”
Siddell shrugged. “Anything’s better than what’s on the box. Fucking Perry Como. I’d rather listen to anything but that … or you.”
Eddie wasn’t surprised by what Siddell said. He knew Siddell didn’t want to waste a single second of his precious life with some garbage hauler. All Siddell wanted was to bull through the rest of the shift, then disappear the way he always did after work. But there were still six hours to go, and no way was Eddie going to go straight through it without a cold beer. Siddell looked like a guy who never required cold refreshment,
but that didn’t matter to Eddie. He could sit and watch, the fucking twit.
Eddie took a sip from the mug. “You look like shit, Terry,” he said.
Siddell shrugged.
“Like shit warmed over,” Eddie added, taking another poke.
Siddell turned away, locked his eyes on the front of the bar.
They’d spent the last three hours cleaning out Drainage Pipe 4, scrubbing its walls clean of the weird drawing they’d found there. The entire time, Siddell had looked completely spooked, like a man going through another man’s insides. But then, what could Terry Siddell possibly know about that kind of feeling? Siddell hadn’t been in the war, hadn’t seen what a man looked like after a shell had blown him inside out. What must it be like to live the way Siddell did, safe from everything, cushioned by money and his family name, with nothing to worry about, so that he never looked the way Eddie knew he sometimes looked, especially when money was tight and the holidays were coming up, a sweaty, nervous little guy, eyes peeled back, as if constantly searching for a sniper in the brush?
What the hell, Eddie thought, try one more. “Shit on a shingle,” he said with an edgy laugh. “That’s what you look like, Terry.”
“Fuck you,” Siddell said.
Eddie laughed again, satisfied that he’d done what he could to get even, taken a couple of pokes, used the only power he had, which was the power to annoy. He smiled. Charlie would have loved it, he thought, and if he’d been there, the two of them would have gone at Siddell again and again, rubbed his fucking peevish face in the creepy little shit he was. But Eddie had mouthed
off to his supervisor in the Sanitation Department, then slugged him, been fired, and so he would never again work with Charlie, never again roar at his jokes or feel the warm beam of his smile. He should have taken Charlie’s advice from the start.
Keep a bright smile over that black heart of yours, Eddie.
Then Charlie’s impish smile.
And whistle while you work.
“How long are we going to be here?” Siddell turned off the transistor radio and sank it into the pocket of his shirt. “Fucking hours?”
“Till I finish my beer.”
Siddell frowned sullenly. “Well, don’t take all night.”
Eddie took a swig and studied Siddell’s pale face and annoyed eyes, trying to get a fix on the young man opposite him. It wasn’t that there was anything deep in Siddell, he decided, it was just that he never jawed with the other guys, never bragged about some girl he was banging or anything like that. Eddie would have felt better if Siddell were merely a guy who by nature kept his cards close to the vest. But that wasn’t it at all, Eddie supposed. He could imagine Siddell talking his head off to the other young men at the Winchester Heights Tennis Club. It wasn’t that Siddell didn’t talk, it was that he didn’t talk to people like Eddie, working stiffs who ate pork and beans out of the can and whom Siddell probably regarded as little more than pack animals.
Eddie brought the mug to his lips, wishing he were more like Charlie Sweeney. “You can do anything, Eddie,” Charlie had told him, “as long as you follow it with a glad hand and a smile.” And Charlie had proved that true, Eddie thought. Charlie had never been fired despite the fact that in certain ways he was lazy, even a tad deceitful, taking sick days when he wasn’t sick, his way of getting even. “The art of life,” he’d claimed, “is
to take what you need and grin while you do it.” That was the problem, Eddie realized. Eddie was no good at grinning, glad-handing, poking a guy and making him like it because at the end of the poke there was a ready smile and a hearty laugh. To hide what you really were, what you really felt, the anger that bubbled up in you, the vein of malice that ran through your soul, that was the secret. With the right grin, you could tear their hearts out, and they’d still slap you on the back, buy you a beer, say, Hey, Eddie, go home to your sick kid. If he could only swallow the anger, the sense of being totally and forever fucked, the world could be his. But he couldn’t. That was the worst card he’d been dealt, he thought, that he wasn’t Charlie, and never could be.
He downed the last of the beer.
“Okay,” he said, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Let me give my kid a call, then we’ll hit the road.”
At the phone booth, Eddie dialed his home number. Mrs. Wilson answered.
“How’s she doing?” Eddie asked.
“The fever didn’t break yet.”
“Is she still throwing up?”
“A little while ago, but she’s sleeping now.”
“Okay,” Eddie told her. “I’ll be home around six.”
“It’s Laurie’s birthday,” Mrs. Wilson reminded him.
“Yeah, I know.”
“She’ll be expecting a little something.” Mrs. Wilson’s tone grew faintly accusatory. “Mr. Sweeney brought her a birthday present.”
“Don’t worry, I got her something too. Nice. A nice present.”
“She wouldn’t open Mr. Sweeney’s gift before she opened yours.”
His daughter’s devotion lifted Eddie’s heart, but it
sank again when he recalled that he hadn’t been able to buy Laurie the little Betsy McCall doll she’d asked for. All the other girls are getting them, she’d said, and Eddie had promised, but now …
Mrs. Wilson dragged it down again. “You need a wife, Eddie.”
“The one I had didn’t think so,” Eddie snapped, his anger flaring. He swallowed hard, calmed himself. “Anyway, I’ll get home as fast as I can.”
“When she wakes up she’ll ask for you.”
There it was again, Eddie thought, the suggestion of failure, that if Eddie had anything between his ears he wouldn’t be in this fix, so strapped for money he had to haul garbage while his sick daughter cried for him. Poor provider. So poor he might not even have a birthday present for Laurie’s eighth birthday. Poor provider. The phrase his father had always used to describe the losers of this world.
“I’ll get home soon as I can,” Eddie assured Mrs. Wilson in a tone that made him cringe. “No beer after work, no nothing. I’ll come right home.” He hung up and returned to the booth where Siddell remained in his usual moody silence.
“Okay, let’s get going,” he told Siddell. “Six more hours and you can go home to your—” He stopped, wondering what Siddell could possibly go home to. A cat? A bird? Some sort of snake struck Eddie as more likely. Nothing dangerous though. A little green garden snake, eyes like glass, skin papery as a dead man’s. “Anyway, we’re in the home stretch now.”
Siddell looked at him sourly but said nothing as he got to his feet.
Siddell Carting Truck 12 rested heavily at the curb, half filled with garbage, a sickening, sweet stink wafting
from its open bed to poison the air inside the working-class apartment buildings that surrounded it.
“The whole neighborhood stinks,” Siddell said glumly.